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The other day, Gary Conn over at BloggingQuestions.com discovered that a lot of his visitors used a dial up internet connection to access his website. He also admitted that he had recently tested his site on dial up and was horrified at how slow it was. He said: I used dial up access a few weeks ago and loaded my blog and it was a nightmare. It took over three minutes to load up completely.

So we decided to test our own pages and profile our visitors.

According to Google Analytics, about 2.15% of our visitors are on dial up. Clearly, this is a large enough percentage for us to be concerned.

But when we tested our site on a typical dial up connection, most pages loaded in well under 30 seconds. Not bad! (Image Credits: John-Morgan)

So Why Does Gary Conn’s Blog Load Slowly on Dial up?

Dial up internet speeds are much slower than the connection speeds that most of us use. I, for example, have no problem viewing websites on my 20Mbps connection. However, on slower connections, things are much different.

So here are a few things that are responsible for the long load time.

1. Widgets

Widgets, or special add-ons which incorporate media from external websites, are big reasons for slow sites. In fact, widgets can even noticeably slow down websites on fast connections.

2. Advertisements and Images

Banner ads and images, depending on size, can be very bulky and take a lot of time to download. The netpartner animated banner advertisement on this website is over 400KB, by far the largest element on the page! (Note: Animated images are much larger than non-animated images.)

Additionally, the greater the number of images on a web page, the slower it will be.

3. JavaScript, CSS, and Whitespace

Sometimes the source code is at fault. There could be unnecessary or redundant CSS or JavaScript on each page. Additionally, there would be excess whitespace (unnecessary carriage returns, new lines, or spaces). All of these things, which have no noticeable effect on fast connections, notably increase download time on dial up.

Gary Conn’s Blog Is Fast on Other Connection Speeds… Should He Optimize For Dial up?

Short Answer: No.

Gary Conn mentioned that the visitors using dial up amounted to 1,089 over the last 30 days. But based on the traffic rankings for his blog, these visitors represent a small percentage of total visitors, likely less than 3 or 4 percent.

Besides, removing the things which slow the site down would hurt its popularity and its profitability. For example, if the widgets were removed, there would be less interactivity and it would be harder to bookmark or share his articles. Similarly, if the banner ads were removed, the website would lose a significant portion of its income.

What About Your Website?

When it comes to making this decision for your website, it is important to pay attention to your statistics. If a SIGNIFICANT portion of your visitors DO use dial up to access your website, then you should optimize your website for them. If, however, only a small percentage use dial up, consider whether the benefits of having widgets, banners, images, etc… outweigh the disadvantages.

Want to test how fast your website is? Check out this handy website speed analyzer by WebsiteOptimization.com.

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Tags: image optimization, load time

16 Responses to “How Slow (or Fast) Is Your Website on Dial Up?”

On January 26, 2009 at 10:56 am,Kurt Avish wrote:
You got a connection of 20Mbps :S
I am using a broadband of 128Kbps lol. The fastest we have here is 2Mbps and its damn expensive. Ofcourse there are the technologies but Mauritius Telecom want to taste the maximum profit due to lack of enough competition
God…when will I have a 20Mpbs?
Concerning loading speed, the template used also have a great effect on dial ups. I have many friends who use the very old 56kbps dial up here. I used to use an old template which had lots of images and it would take over 5 minutes to load at their place. Now it take approximately 2 to 3 on dial ups here. While on my connection..which is a turtle still it takes about 30 to 50 seconds.
On January 26, 2009 at 1:57 pm,Ajith Edassery wrote:
My personal priority always has been to keep my blog and websites easily accessible by 56Kbps dial-up users. The reason is that almost 50% of my visitors are from India where probably only 25-30% use broadband.
Only recently my blog became slow loading due to (1) my hosting service quality has come down (2) SEO challenge banners are a bit bigger in size and (3) un-optimized queries by some plugins
On January 26, 2009 at 2:49 pm,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Kurt: Clearly, I take my internet connection for granted. I don’t know what I’d do with 128Kbps… I haven’t used connection speeds like that for at least 10 years…
As for your blog, I see that you have quite a few images, widgets, and even a flash tag cloud… your visitors are truly dedicated to surf your site on 56Kbps.
@Ajith: Yes, I have noticed that you do keep your extra media to a minimum. Hopefully your host starts serving websites faster… Do you use any caching plugins?
On January 26, 2009 at 4:54 pm,Jen wrote:
Shirley- I like you take internet connection speed for granted. I recently went to my Mom’s house who can’t get anything but dial up and I wanted to throw the computer out the window- I don’t think I would spend nearly as much time online if I had to wait 2-3 minutes for most websites to load. Not patient enough.
I took a look at the website analyzer and it looks like I am pretty quick- thanks for the tool.
On January 26, 2009 at 7:07 pm,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Jen: Yes, we’d all use the internet a whole lot less if we had to suffer through slow-page-loads on a daily basis.
Yeh, that website analyzer is a very useful tool. I especially like how it breaks down your entire page into filesizes so that you can see which elements are causing the problems.
On January 27, 2009 at 7:26 am,Dennis Edell wrote:
I think I’m OK; no verbal visitor complaints anyway. I haven’t checked yet to see how many are on dial up though, that’s good info to have.
Btw – somehow I find myself unsubscribed from your blog. Could you send me the email subscribe link again?
On January 27, 2009 at 7:28 am,Dennis Edell wrote:
Nevermind – got it.
On January 28, 2009 at 12:08 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Dennis: Well, your website is pretty lightweight in terms of widgets and images. So I think that you are fine.
Hmmm. That’s strange about being unsubscribed… I did migrate my feed to the new Google FeedBurner. So that could have been the problem. I had noticed some other glitches.
On January 28, 2009 at 9:48 am,Dennis Edell wrote:
I do try to be sure all widgets are as close to the bottom as possible. I’ll also be reworking the whole blog as far as post images are concerned.
I’m not sure when you did the Google thing, but looking at post times, it seems I’ve been unsubbed for at least a week or two or more.
No worries now, I re-upped.
On January 28, 2009 at 11:34 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Dennis: Hmmm. Strange, the migration was last week. Thanks for resubscribing.
I’ll be looking to see the changes that you make with regard to post images. Right now, it doesn’t appear that you use post images. Are you going to make images a regular thing?
On January 28, 2009 at 12:58 pm,Dennis Edell wrote:
The first couple months show am image every post. Then I stopped with plans to go back over them all and have an image every other post with continuation to that effect.
Not only did I never get to going over the old posts, I never continued every other post thinking I wanted to go over the old ones first.
Got that? LOL!
On January 28, 2009 at 9:56 pm,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Dennis: Got it. And I just took a look at your archives. It appears that the type of posts that you’ve written have changed a bit as well.
Yeh, I have no consistency here with images. If I think an image is in order, then I add one. But most posts do not have them.
On January 29, 2009 at 9:05 am,Dennis Edell wrote:
Wow someone reads archives?! LOL
If you mean the fact that most recently have been all about blogging, then you’re right. I actually have a post in mind about that…it’s due to change.
On August 21, 2010 at 10:51 pm,Icechen1 wrote:
People still use dial-up these days? I still remember the good ol’ days of AOL and patiently waiting for pages to load xD
On September 25, 2010 at 12:27 pm,Somerset Web Design wrote:
Maybe also relevant to check how fast a website is on 3G?
On June 7, 2011 at 7:29 am,yoga retreats wrote:
thanks so much for the information here. My site is actually pretty fast on dial up thank god